Roots to Rocket Science | Beauty, Health, and Everything Else

In this week's episode of the Roots to Rocket Science Podcast, host Natalie Novak had Jonathan George. Known as "the human hitmaker". Jonathan is a singer, songwriter, and producer. Winning the title Grand Champion on Ed McMahon’s “Next Big Star”, a sequel to Star Search in 2001 helped launch his musical identity. He went on to serve as creative director of the Hollywood Pop Academy and continued his work in artist development. George founded JG Entertainment, where he is responsible for developing many young artists.

In this week's episode of the Roots to Rocket Science Podcast, host Natalie Novak had Sandra Diaz co-founder of Nu Evolution cosmetics. Sandra started her career in New York City’s fast-paced Commodity industry. She was responsible for the development and implementation of strategic marketing, advertising, and public relations programs for all Financial and Agricultural Futures and Options contracts.

Sandra’s confidence and determination landed her a job as Advertising Director at a top global financial publishing conglomerate. There, Sandra achieved record-breaking advertising sales for the publications she represented. Bringing in new clients from around the world, she continued to break records, and exceed forecasts before receiving a promotion in a new division, and becoming the top producer in her territory.

Sandra was later offered a partnership at a full-service boutique branding and design firm. At the time she joined the firm, the company was operating at a substantial loss. Since time was critical, Sandra quickly developed strategic corporate partnerships and executed aggressive sales, and marketing strategies to turn a profit in just twelve months.

Prior to launching NU EVOLUTION, Sandra ended her financial career on a high note in the Syndicated Leveraged Loan Market, where she created integrated marketing programs and achieved monumental sales year after year. Sandra holds a Bachelor’s degree in Marketing with a concentration in Finance.

After a successful career in healthcare, Shreya founded Hyve, a DTC company which is disrupting the cleaning products category with probiotic-powered, plant-based formulations. Hyve is a mission-driven company, focused on redefining ‘clean’ in every aspect and giving back to clean water initiatives globally.

The journey to hyve started with a simple question of “how clean is our cleaning culture?” Shreya found mainstream cleaning products to be unsustainable, both physically and environmentally -- single-use large plastic bottles, ingredients leading to disruption of home and skin microbiomes, and products unable to penetrate biofilm protecting most harmful bacteria.  With a background in science and a passion for the planet, Shreya developed products to address each concern -- packaging and formulation that reduces the company’s carbon footprint, ingredients that harness the power of biology not chemistry, and products that clean safely at the microbial level.  With Hyve’s subscription model, sustainable cleaning just got easier!

In this week's episode of the Roots to Rocket Science Podcast, host Natalie Novak had Tracy Ftacek. She has made a career out of empowering others to see their own beauty, lean into it, and unapologetically share it with the world. It’s not merely her decades of experience that make her an industry leader, although that’s part of it. After all, you don’t launch a successful business and mobile app without knowing your shit. But the true beauty of the Pretty Convenient model is that it’s built on meeting the needs of beauty professionals and clients alike—something Tracy has capitalized on simply because she understands women on both sides of the chair. Busy professionals need someone trained and reliable to make them feel beautiful. Stylists need to feel empowered to own their expertise and schedules. Put them together and you have something Pretty Convenient.

By creating a business and service built on trust, Tracy has disrupted the beauty industry. She doesn’t jealously guard her prolific beauty expertise and business acumen—she takes every opportunity she can to share it with others, in service of creating a more balanced community of stylists who are creative AND entrepreneurial, thus better able to serve an increasingly demanding client base. Because why should anyone be satisfied with the status quo?

Tracy will be the first to tell you that there’s always room to grow, whether it’s your team, your business, or your confidence in yourself. As a founder, boss, trainer, and mentor, Tracy recognizes the responsibility she has to pay it forward to help the next generation of creative entrepreneurs thrive. As an artist, confidant, and teacher, Tracy understands the privilege she’s been given to find what makes someone beautiful and bring it to life. It’s more than makeup and bigger than beauty. It’s beautifully disruptive.

In this week’s episode, Natalie and Ron sat down with Dan Farrell & Janna Hibler of Clean Juice, a wellness-minded organic juice bar, to discuss what “living organic” actually looks like. The crew delves into the social and environmental impacts of keeping their businesses as close to the earth as possible, as well as enumerating the health-boosting potential of organic products.

Additionally, they discussed why it’s so important right now to keep your body in peak condition as we all try to remain naturally-insulated from COVID-19. They go over the importance of keeping out all that unnecessary, over processed food Americans have become so accustomed to while being intentional about what you should be fueling your body with!

Clean Juice is a locally owned, certified-organic juice and smoothie bar providing quick access to organic, healthy food. They specialize in fresh juices, smoothies, protein smoothies, acai bowls, avocado toast, and organic, cold-pressed juice & juice cleanses. If you’re interested in learning more about Clean Juice, visit their Facebook page: @cleanjuiceknappscrossing

If you’re a fan of this podcast and would like to learn more about KPS Essential’s founders, mission, or products, visit us at: www.kpsessentials.com

Our introductory episode focuses on the journey taken by our founders, Ron Webb & Natalie Novak. Coming from vastly different backgrounds, they worked for YEARS to disrupt and reshape the organic skincare industry by focusing on real science, root cause treatments, and ethical sourcing.